New Orleans's New Connection

At CC's Coffee House in New Orleans, Doss Hindman, left, John Ryan, Colleen Timmons and Ren French use a WiFi connection last month to get online. The system run by the city is to be operational today in New Orleans's business district and the French Quarter.
(By Eliot Kamenitz -- The Times-picayune)

Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation's first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible.

The system, which Mayor C. Ray Nagin is scheduled to announce at a news conference today, also will be used by law enforcement and for an array of city government functions, such as speeding approval of building permits.

Much of the equipment to run the network was donated by companies, but New Orleans will own it and operate all its components at the outset. The system, which uses devices mounted on streetlights to beam out fast Internet connections for wireless-enabled computers, is scheduled to be operational today in the central business district and the French Quarter and to be expanded over time.

"Now, with a single step, city departments, businesses and private citizens can access a tool that will help speed the rebuilding of New Orleans as a better, safer and stronger city," Nagin said in a statement. "This is how technology fuels collaboration, allowing our best ideas to come together so we can speak with one voice."

But the move probably will stir an already roiling national debate over whether it makes sense for localities to launch their own systems.

Cities around the country are studying or have deployed "wireless fidelity," or WiFi, networks, because they often provide more affordable Internet access than private carriers and can help bridge the digital divide in low-income areas or because high-speed Internet access is not provided by either telephone or cable companies.

Telephone and cable companies oppose the moves as unfair, taxpayer-funded competition and have successfully lobbied several states to prohibit or restrict the networks.

Louisiana is one of those states, prohibiting any locality from offering Internet connection speeds of more than 144 kilobits per second, about twice the speed of dial-up but one-tenth to one-twentieth of what is typically provided via digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable-modem services.

The New Orleans system will feature 512-kilobit-per-second speed, which city officials said is the most the network can handle efficiently at first. Because the city is under a state of emergency, it can skirt existing law.

Eventually, city officials said, they expect to outsource operation of the commercial side of the network to a private company, as municipalities such as Philadelphia are doing. Philadelphia charges users a monthly fee.

But they have little patience for what they see as efforts by telecommunications companies to restrict their ability to determine their own Internet future. For them, moving to a permanent wireless system is a matter of survival for a city whose future remains uncertain.

"My number-one job is to restimulate the economy," said Greg Meffert, a deputy mayor, the city's chief technology officer and a former tech company entrepreneur. The system, he said, "is going to be the backbone of a brand new, never fully tried set of technology visions" to help distinguish New Orleans from other large cities.